New Evidence in Historical Cannibalism Debate

An anonymous reader writes "ScienceNOW is reporting that a team of scientists led by Geneticist Jaume Bertranpetit has called into question findings from an earlier study of human prion diseases. The first study, led by John Collinge of University College London, stated that the existence of a gene that codes for prions was a result of a "balancing act" that had kept it in the gene pool for so long. The balancing act was supposedly due to widespread cannibalistic practices in human history. The new report suggests that their results were skewed because of low frequency variations known as 'ascertainment bias.'"

Comments

that's 'ascertainmanet'

[KeeghanMacAllan]

...but the mainstream news media will continue to utilize the cannabalism story due to their 'entertainment' bias

to be honest..

[Combas]

It doesnt really matter that much to me if my ancestors did a little canibalism, or even a lot for that matter. After all Im pretty sure that somewhere down the line some or perhaps even a lot of my ancestors engaged in equally terrible things to survive or perhaps even took part in them without "survival" really being an issue.

These thoughts dont exactly delight me.

However they dont really frighten me either.

To me all this article really says is that genetics is more complicated that we are currently able to understand and goes a lot deeper than just decoding a genome. One scientists sees some data and comes to a conclusion, another scientist looks at the same data a couple years later and reaches the opposite conclusion.

Re:The other white meat

[floamy]

Yeah. And it's not even culture. This was so long ago that it was just the history of the species.

Okay but how skewed?

[SmallFurryCreature]

The article is just a bit over my head but I don't think it says how wrong the original conclusion was just they think cannabilsm was not as common as the previous study suggested.

But how much? Did we eat each other daily? Weekly? On special holidays? It can't have been to common anyway. If you eat more of a food source then is grown your run out. or put another way. Even if you farmed humans you would be hard put to serve baby more then once per year. Presuming of course that factory farming is really a recent invention.

Anyway wasn't cannabilism more ritual then food source? Eat the X of a vanguished enemy to gain his X. God forbid to think what the chinese would serve after the battle.

Oh well whatever the truth just don't accept an invitation to the donner party. Or board an airplane with an Uruguayan rugby team. Well unless you are feeling peckish.

Re:Zork

[quokkapox]

If I could remember the password for my account (which I haven't been able to do for about five years now), and had karma, I would give it to you.

How touching. Karma is meaningless here, when you can be denied mod points forever simply because you criticized the editors.

Re:The other white meat

[quokkapox]

Every culture used to do some weird/nasty/mean things at some point.

Exactly. We should only consider to be "taboo" those practices that are taboo across all cultures everywhere. Anything taboo that can be generalized is probably really worth avoiding, because if most every human is averse to it, it's likely to be bad for our survival. We should pay attention to our universal instincts.

Re:The other white meat

[Randall_Jones]

We should only consider to be "taboo" those practices that are taboo across all cultures everywhere.

First of all, you use the term "taboo" in your proposed definition of taboo. That never makes for a helpful definition.

Second, your statement can either be taken to mean: if it's not forbidden in all cultures, then it's ok to do. Which means if you can find one culture that did not forbid, say, rape or murder or child molestation (which you probably could do), we should change our laws so as to stop discouraging these misunderstood "non-taboo" practices.

I doubt you mean anything that dumb, right? In which case you must be trying to distinguish between "taboo" and "immoral", where "taboo" means maladaptive and forbidden across cultures, and "immoral" is questionable but non-maladaptive behavior that should still be discouraged. Otherwise you've inadvertantly made yourself a NAMBLA advocate.

Re:Another /usr/{games,bin}/fortune wisdom

[Redwin]

In a discussion about cannibalism maybe "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup" is more appropriate. Alternativly "Do not meddle in the affairs of psychiatrists, for you are crunchy and taste good with fava beans" might be even more topical. :-)